(In case you missed it, we're right in the middle of a wingding. Here are Parts I and II of the Superhuman Lineage of Cody Powell, in the event you want the rest of this to make sense.)
Sorry for the lack of an entry on Thursday. I was ready to get started and blaze away with the history of my great great great grandfather, Spaghettio Powell, but when I got home, my computer had been sabotaged. Perhaps someone doesn't want the world to hear the salacious history of Spaghettio? Too bad, fools!
Spaghettio Powell, like all other Powells, was an interesting man. As discussed previously, his father was a half-cyborg in a circus freak show. His mother was reputed to be a vampire from a small village in the Alps; she too made her living as a human oddity. (Their pairing explains his name, in fact: she loved spaghetti and he loved input/output, thus leading to Spaghett-IO.) Spaghettio's father was a rounder, a man too frisky to be chained down by the burdens of domestic life, and due to this, he spent nearly all of his time with his mother, the reputed vampiress.
Was his mother a true vampire? We cannot say now, but we can say definitively that Spaghettio wasn't. He thought he was, however. When he moved to a new area, he distributed leaflets entitled "Living With a Vampire Neighbor". To his friends, he gave cloves of garlic in case he attacked. He traveled everywhere in a coffin, and had an almost fanatical devotion to his cape. Yes, he played the part.
Unfortunately for Spaghettio, he only excelled in the vampire lifestyle, not in actually being a vampire. Many, many accounts detail him capturing a random stray cat and attempting to drink its blood, only to be overwhelmed with nausea and vomit explosively on himself. In fact, this was such a popular sight, the Dallas newspaper made it a featured segment from 1893-1907.
It wasn't just his intolerance for blood that made him a phony vampire; he failed at many other parts of being a vampire. During a property tax dispute, he called the Dallas County tax assessor a "barrelfull of soggy dungarees". Confused by this gibberish insult, the tax assessor chased him through town with a fencepost. When he caught Spaghettio, he bonked Spaghettio on the head and jabbed the fence post through his heart. Spaghettio live through this assault, saying only that his ventricles felt a little itchy afterwards.
Since the freak shows had no need for a vampire impersonator, Spaghettio had to leave the family business. He initially became a fairy tale writer. He poured all of his resources into a story of 4 adolescent turtles who become horribly deformed through chemicals and dedicate their to vigilante justice through martial arts. In fact, others found great success with that formula, but Spaghettio did not, perhaps due to the title of the tales, "Professor McGilicuddy and the Ear Box Brigade".
It was at this point that Spaghettio, like other desperate men of his era, turned to taxidermy. Here, he found a fertile playground for his gothic imagination. Collectors paid thousands for his scenes of vampire chipmunks, hedgehogs, and basset hounds.
He made enough, in fact, to purchase a Russian mail order bride. Her name was Vanya, she was a devout Marxist, and as such, she loathed Spaghettio for his taxidermy fortune. She loathed him so much, she devoted all of her energies to turning their firstborn, Rasputin Powell, into the revolutionary who would lay ruin to the free market system. Rasputin Powell was my great great grandfather, and we will pick up with his story tomorrow.
Posted by Cody at January 8, 2007 06:32 PM